#stuart russell

[tomorrowusa]

Will it take a ‘Chernobyl-scale disaster’ for us to regulate AI? | Stuart Russell

Unsafe AI systems are leading to cyber weapons of mass destruction writes Stuart Russell, a computer scientist known for his contributions t

It probably will take a disaster to regulate AI.

In early June, (Anthropic) posted an article describing early signs of recursive self-improvement (RSI), a process in which an AI system devises ways to increase its own intelligence, leading to a greater ability to improve itself, and so on. Obviously, uncontrolled RSI could produce a runaway feedback loop that leads to an irreversible loss of human control. Anthropic suggested the world should “slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development”. Then on 12 June, the White House issued an export control directive banning access to Anthropic’s new frontier models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for all foreign nationals – including many of its own key researchers. Anthropic responded by shutting the models down altogether.

Not all companies will display even the relatively moderate amount of caution as Anthropic.

One leading AI CEO told me he didn’t expect serious regulation to happen until there was a “Chornobyl-scale disaster”. If that happens, of course, the AI companies can expect to be shut down immediately and perhaps permanently. The recent changes in White House policy suggest we might not need a Chornobyl to spur real regulation, but perhaps only a Three Mile Island. The kind of regulation we need is not new: a licensing regime that requires a minimum safety standard before a system can be built and released. This is how we handle nuclear power, airplanes, buildings, elevators, hairdressers and sandwich makers. Is it too much to ask of trillion-dollar AI corporations, who claim to be building the most dangerous technology in history?

[sentivium]

AI CEOs Admit 25% Extinction Risk… WITHOUT Our Consent!

AI leaders are acknowledging the potential for human extinction due to advanced AI, but are they making these decisions without public input? We discuss the ethical implications and the need for greater transparency and control over AI development.

[celeryjiaozi]

stuart russell, human compatible

[kill-ss-ingasuka]

If we define success in terms of agent’s opinion of its own performance, an agent could achieve perfect rationality simply by deluding itself that its performance was perfect.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

[celeryjiaozi]

“Go all the way to, you know, the children who are raised by wolves or whatever. The outcome seems to be that, “Oh my gosh, if they’re abandoned in the woods as infants and somehow they survive and grow up, they don’t speak Latin”. They don’t speak at all. And they have some survival skills, but are they writing poetry? Are they trying to learn more about physics? No, they’re not doing any of those things. So there’s nothing natural about, shall we say, scientific curiosity. It’s something that’s emerged over thousands of years of culture.

So we have to think what kind of culture do we need in order to produce adults who retain curiosity and autonomy and vigor as opposed to just becoming institutionalized. And I think if you look at E.M Forster’s story “The Machine Stops”, I think that’s a pretty good exploration of this. That everyone in his story is looked after. No one has any kind of useful job. In fact, the most useful thing they can think of is to listen to MOOCs. So he invented the MOOC in 1909 so people are giving online open lectures to anyone who wants to listen, and then people subscribe to various podcast series, I guess you’d call them. And that’s kind of all they do. There’s very little actual purposeful activity left for the human race. And this is not desirable; to me, this is a disaster. We could destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons. We could wipe out the habitable biosphere with climate change. These would be disasters, but this is another disaster, right?

A future where the human race has lost purpose. That the vast majority of individuals function with very little autonomy or awareness or knowledge or learning. So how do you create a culture and educational process? I think what humans value in themselves is a really important thing. How do you make it so that people make the effort to learn and discover and gain autonomy and skills when all of the incentive to do that up to now, disappears. And our whole education system is very expensive. As I point out in the book, when you add up how much time people have spent learning to be competent human beings, it’s about a trillion person years and it’s all because you have to. Otherwise things just completely fall apart. And we’ve internalized that in our whole system of how we reward people. We give them grades. We give them accolades. We give them Nobel prizes. There’s an enormous amount in our culture which is there to reward the process of learning and becoming competent and skilled.

And you could argue, “Well that’s from the enlightenment” or whatever. But I would argue it’s mostly a consequence of the fact that that’s functional. And when the functional purpose of all that disappears, I think we might see it decay very rapidly unless we take steps to avoid it.”

stuart russell on human-compatible AI for 80,000 hours

[haikuyosef]

Steady progress was reported

Climbing a tree up to the moon - until we reached the top of the tree

[thespiritualmultinerd]

Anders Hansen möter... – Stuart Russell

Med artificiell intelligens håller vi på att skapa något som är smartare än människan. Hur kommer vi som individer påverkas av det och hur k

Interview with AI researcher Stuart Russell on the role of AI now and in the future. (Introduction in Swedish, interview in English).

Anyone else feel like the classical tale of asking the genie for something but forgetting to define the question is coming true?

[chatbotfriends]

AI Doesn’t Need Consciousness to be Frightening

Stuart Russell isn’t just an AI expert; he literally wrote the book on it. Russell’s textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which he co-authored with Peter Norvig in the mid ‘90s, is still the gold standard for students in the field. So Russell’s signature on an open letter last month that warned about AI’s enormous potential pitfalls carried serious weight. Russell, a professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley, isn’t a wild-eyed AI doomsayer; he believes the technology has the potential to transform the world for the better in astonishing ways. But he also worries that researchers have already lost a complete understanding of what their creations can do

AI Doesn’t Need Consciousness to be Frightening

Prominent computer scientist Stuart Russell, who has urged a pause in artificial intelligence experiments, says sentience is a red herring.